With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

who hires this crew?

2009 April 17 20:44

The wife-unit is a couple of states away, so I decided to get the Netflix queue going again. I put in _Fight Club_, which has been sitting around the house for at least a month.

I watched the first 12 minutes, took out the disk and watched John Stewart instead.

Ok. It's a movie called _Fight Club_. Advertisements and posters strongly feature a very buff Brad Pitt, sometimes with his shirt off, and the movie has a reputation for being violent. So how does the movie start? With 12 solid minutes of expository inner-voice dialog that make me want to shoot the main character. And evidently the arc of the first bit of the movie is the main character making fun of people with testicular cancer, as a lead-up to his line saying "she doesn't have testicular cancer (about Helena Bonham Carter)?

Who thought this was a good idea? What editor looked at a rough cut of 12 minutes of frankly offensive exposition at the beginning of an action movie and said "yeah, we'll go with that".

A quick look at IMDB indicates that the director is David Fincher, who has directed a whole lot of music videos, which isn't necessarily bad. He's directed some movies that were pretty hard-core thrillers that I haven't seen. He directed _Alien 3_, which now that I think about it had a whole heck of a lot of expository boring bits for a movie in an action series.

Kevin Smith (who's an acquired taste as a director but I really like him for his honesty) has a long story about meeting with Warner Brother producer John Peters about making their Superman movie. Peters had three directives for the movie: 1) Superman can't fly 2) Superman can't wear his costume and 3) The end of the movie has to have a big reveal of a giant spider that's the villian. That particular movie didn't get made, but Peters went on to be producer on _Wild Wild West_. When I see movies like _Fight Club_, I realize that it's most likely that Smith was telling the truth, and it represents a movie was stupid ideas like that do get made.

Oy.